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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Budget-Aware Adaptive Adversarial Patches for Black-Box Object Detection

Adversarial patches pose a practical threat to modern object detectors. Prior work shows vulnerability, but three gaps limit actionable insight: (i) few score-based black-box attacks jointly optimize patch location, texture, and size under tight query budgets; (ii) success is rarely tied to the patch's visual footprint; and (iii) evaluations often conflate EOT robustness with plain-view suppression. We present \method{}, a query-efficient, budget-adaptive black-box attack that couples a lightweight Contextual Thompson-Sampling placer with NES-style pixel updates, growing the patch only when progress stalls. Reporting is anchored by a strict plain-image suppression test; EOT is audited but never used as a substitute for success, and optional appearance/printability weights expose strength–visibility trade-offs. Across YOLOv5, Faster R-CNN, and YOLOS, \method{} achieves strong suppression on CNN-based detectors and substantial suppression on the transformer-based detector, using compact patches and exposing clear query–footprint trade-offs relative to fixed-size and heuristic baselines. A print–capture pilot further shows transfer across unseen physical objects and viewpoints.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

NeuMesh++: Towards Versatile and Efficient Volumetric Editing with Disentangled Neural Mesh-based Implicit Field

Recently neural implicit rendering techniques have evolved rapidly and demonstrated significant advantages in novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. However, existing neural rendering methods for editing purposes offer limited functionalities, e.g., rigid transformation and category-specific editing. In this paper, we present a novel mesh-based representation by encoding the neural radiance field with disentangled geometry, texture, and semantic codes on mesh vertices, which empowers a set of efficient and comprehensive editing functionalities, including mesh-guided geometry editing, designated texture editing with texture swapping, filling and painting operations, and semantic-guided editing. To this end, we develop several techniques including a novel local space parameterization to enhance rendering quality and training stability, a learnable modification color on vertex to improve the fidelity of texture editing, a spatial-aware optimization strategy to realize precise texture editing, and a semantic-aided region selection to ease the laborious annotation of implicit field editing. Extensive experiments and editing examples on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method on representation quality and editing ability. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/neumeshplusplus/

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Ling and Ring 2.6 Technical Report: Efficient and Instant Agentic Intelligence at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Efficient and scalable agentic intelligence requires models that can deliver both low-latency responses and strong reasoning capabilities while remaining practical to train, serve, and deploy. In this report, we present Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6, a family of models designed to address this challenge at scale. Ling-2.6 is optimized for instant response generation and high capability per output token, whereas Ring-2.6 is tailored for deeper reasoning and more advanced agentic workflows. Instead of training from scratch, we upgrade the Ling-2.0 base model through architectural migration pre-training and large-scale post-training. This upgrade is guided by a unified co-design of model architecture, optimization objectives, serving systems, and agent training environments, enabling improvements in both model capability and deployment efficiency. At the architectural level, we introduce a hybrid linear attention design that integrates Lightning Attention with MLA, improving the efficiency of long-context training and decoding. To further enhance token efficiency, we optimize capability per output token through Evolutionary Chain-of-Thought, Linguistic Unit Policy Optimization, bidirectional preference alignment, and shortest-correct-response distillation. For agentic capabilities, we propose KPop, a reinforcement learning framework designed to support stable training of Ring-2.6-1T on large-scale environment-grounded data. KPop improves training efficiency through asynchronous scheduling across coding, search, tool use, and workflow execution, enabling scalable learning from complex agent-environment interactions. Together, Ling-2.6 and Ring-2.6 provide a practical pathway toward efficient, scalable, and open agentic systems. We open-source all checkpoints in the 2.6 family to support further research and development in practical agentic intelligence.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2507.21164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning with an analytically solvable One-Class SVM (OCSVM), through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a \deleted{new} benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI \deleted{subtle} lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad_ocsvm_guided_repr_learning.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

作者:

arXiv:2605.00074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha + \mathrm{TV}$, where the additive term is the calibration-to-test distribution shift under family holdout (a certified ceiling of 24-49% across folds). Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% empirical test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget

We study context compression for multi-hop question answering with small language models. We propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements, preserving reasoning evidence at lower token cost. In controlled experiments on MuSiQue, TwoWiki, and HotpotQA, Telegraph English outperforms three matched-budget compression baselines (character-level deletion, truncation, and random sub-sampling) on every dataset, with gains of 13 to 20 F1 percentage point. It also outperforms a coherent prose summary produced by the same encoder on the hardest dataset. A pre-registered depth-interaction hypothesis is null: the advantage does not grow with reasoning depth within datasets. We interpret these results as evidence that readable symbolic re-expression preserves entity content more densely than either natural language or coherent summarization at matched token budget.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Combinatorial docking and molecular generation to navigate over 100-billion molecules for prospective ligand discovery

Commercially available make-on-demand libraries now exceed 100 billion compounds, requiring over 50 years to screen on 2,000 CPU cores using conventional docking. We present two complementary approaches to address this challenge. CombiDOCK, a combinatorial docking framework, enables exhaustive screening at the 100-billion scale within 40 days. MINT-Dock, a generative framework, accelerates navigation of this space by integrating CombiDOCK with Monte Carlo Tree Search. Benchmarked on 46 diverse targets, CombiDOCK matched full-molecule docking accuracy, and MINT-Dock achieved a 4,800-fold enrichment over random selection. Compared with prior billion-scale brute-force campaigns against {sigma}2, VMAT2, and VAChT, prospective CombiDOCK screens of the 100-billion-molecule library yielded higher hit rates and more potent ligands, while MINT-Dock achieved comparable outcomes across single- and multi-target objectives with >20-fold computational cost reductions. Docking-predicted poses of the best VAChT-binding compounds were confirmed by cryo-EM structures. These methods provide exhaustive and generative paths for navigating the trillion-molecule frontier of drug discovery.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Looking Is Not Picking: An Attention-Segment Account of Tool-Selection Failures in LLM Agents

作者:

arXiv:2606.16364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents mis-call tools, and the natural guess is that the model failed to see the right tool in a crowded harness. We show the opposite through a lens concurrent work sets aside – the model's attention to labeled tool-definition segments. On real BFCL failures, by per-candidate attention argmax the model attends most to the correct tool 80% of the time (vs. 21% chance), and the gold is the under-attended segment on only 10%: it looks at the right tool and still picks wrong. This directly refutes the intuitive "crowded-harness / lost-in-the-middle" explanation: the failure is at the decision readout, not the harness, and we pin it there three ways. (1) Input vs. readout: repairing the prompt (reordering or duplicating the gold tool) recovers

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

LAST: Bridging Vision-Language and Action Manifolds via Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment

We take a Gromov-Wasserstein perspective on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning, where the goal is to make the relational geometry of action representations compatible with the semantic geometry of VL embeddings. However, this alignment is non-trivial due to the mathematical heterogeneity between the domains: the semantic space of vision-language is topologically linear and isotropic, whereas the physical manifold of robotic action is non-Euclidean and anisotropic. Their disjoint metric structures render direct regression ill-posed. To resolve this incompatibility, we introduce LAST (Lie-algebraic Action Space Tokenizer), which reconstructs the action space to establish local metric compatibility with the VL modality via a two-stage transformation: (1) Global Topological Linearization: linearizing the action manifold via Lie-algebraic mapping, converting trajectories into a fixed-length, physically additive representation. (2) Local Metric Discretization: hierarchically discretizing the representation into schemas and whitened residuals, yielding approximately isotropic local charts that are statistically aligned with the semantic metric. By resolving the structural mismatch at both global and local levels, LAST enables VLA models with superior convergence and generalizability.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction-enabled topological pumping of Rydberg electrons

arXiv:2606.15126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Topological pumping is a paradigmatic realization of quantized transport in band systems, yet its fate in strongly correlated regimes, especially with long-range interactions, remains largely unexplored. Here we report the experimental observation of interaction-enabled topological pumping of correlated Rydberg electrons in a synthetic lattice. We show that dipolar exchange interactions induce a controllable shift of the underlying topological singularity in parameter space, such that a fixed pumping trajectory can be driven through successive topological transitions by tuning the interaction strength alone. This leads to the emergence and breakdown of quantized transport. The observations are consistent with an effective Rice-Mele description with interaction-renormalized onsite potentials and are supported by characterizing the adiabaticity and robustness to control trajectory imperfections. Our results establish a platform for exploring interaction-controlled topological transport beyond perturbative regimes and open a route toward engineering correlated topological matter in synthetic quantum systems.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

OncoReg: Medical Image Registration for Oncological Challenges

In modern cancer research, the vast volume of medical data generated is often underutilised due to challenges related to patient privacy. The OncoReg Challenge addresses this issue by enabling researchers to develop and validate image registration methods through a two-phase framework that ensures patient privacy while fostering the development of more generalisable AI models. Phase one involves working with a publicly available dataset, while phase two focuses on training models on a private dataset within secure hospital networks. OncoReg builds upon the foundation established by the Learn2Reg Challenge by incorporating the registration of interventional cone-beam computed tomography with standard planning fan-beam CT images in radiotherapy. Accurate image registration is crucial in oncology, particularly for dynamic treatment adjustments in image-guided radiotherapy, where precise alignment is necessary to minimise radiation exposure to healthy tissues while effectively targeting tumours. This work details the methodology and data behind the OncoReg Challenge and provides a comprehensive analysis of the competition entries and results. Findings reveal that feature extraction plays a pivotal role in this registration task. A new method emerging from this challenge demonstrated its versatility, while established approaches continue to perform comparably to newer techniques. Both deep learning and classical approaches still play significant roles in image registration, with the combination of methods, particularly in feature extraction, proving most effective.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A 3D Isovist World Model – Revealing a City's Unseen Geometry and Its Emergent Cross-City Signature

arXiv:2606.03609v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents that navigate cities rely on world models that predict how their surroundings will change as they move. But for navigation, what matters is not what the buildings look like; it is where the agent can go. Most world models nonetheless predict appearance, learning how a scene looks rather than the space an agent can move through. Those that do target geometry, such as bird's-eye-view occupancy grids, flatten the three-dimensional environment onto a ground plane, discarding the above-ground and multi-level structure that shapes real navigation. What is missing is a predictive target that captures the navigable geometry an agent actually traverses, without photometric entanglement and without collapsing the third dimension. Our key idea is to model the open volume between buildings, the negative space, encoded as a 3D isovist: a spherical visibility-depth map recording the distance to the nearest surface in every direction. We introduce an embodied world model that predicts the next isovist from a short history of past isovists and a movement action. The prediction is formulated as a depth residual so the decoder inherits sharp building edges, trained with self-rollout scheduled sampling to keep corrupted context on the geometry manifold, and equipped with a persistent latent bird's-eye-view spatial map for cross-path consistency. Our central finding is emergent and unexpected: a single city-blind model trained on Manhattan and Paris develops a cross-city spatial signature, with city identity linearly decodable from its temporal latents far above single-frame baselines, so the signature lives in the learned dynamics rather than in appearance. The representation is lightweight, interpretable, and reproducible, offering a geometric substrate for spatial reasoning in embodied AI, robotics, and urban analysis, released with an open dataset and pipeline.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Wellbeing After Stroke-2 (WAterS-2): a feasibility study with process evaluation exploring inclusive, accessible, online psychological support after stroke

Objectives: Explore feasibility and acceptability of upskilling a workforce to deliver a co-developed intervention, based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), to support psychological adjustment post-stroke targeting underserved groups. Design: Multi-site, single-arm feasibility study with embedded mixed-methods process evaluation (ISRCTN17628580). Setting: Four NHS community stroke services across England. Participants: 1. Stroke survivors [≥]18 years of age, [≥]4 months post-stroke, reporting psychological difficulties adjusting to stroke, able to consent and access remote group sessions in English; 2. Group facilitators from NHS stroke services, not ACT specialists. Intervention: WAterS-2: an eight-session, remotely-delivered ACT-informed group intervention. Outcome measures: Recruitment, fidelity, safety, acceptability and perceived value were assessed using fidelity checklists, post-intervention surveys and semi-structured interviews with stroke survivors and facilitators. Clinical outcomes including mood (HADS), wellbeing (ONS4), psychological flexibility (AAQ-ABI), measured post-group and three-months later. Results: Nineteen stroke survivors recruited (mean 9.6 months post-stroke; n=5 (26%) minoritised ethnicities; n=10 (52%) with aphasia). Thirteen facilitators - including two peer support workers - delivered the intervention with fidelity following structured training across four services. Drop-out was low (2/19; 11%); with 15 (79%) attending [≥]5/8 sessions. Remote data collection was feasible (79% follow-up completion), with no adverse events recorded. Acceptability was high: survivors valued peer connection, grounding and mindfulness practices. ACT metaphors were helpful for some but challenging for others, including some with aphasia. Online delivery was suitable but limited informal connection. Facilitators reported increased capability, incorporating ACT skills into routine care. NHS workforce pressures and geographically-constrained referral pathways limited recruitment reach. Conclusions: WAterS-2 is feasible, safe, acceptable and inclusive. A mixed workforce, including NHS peer support workers, can be upskilled to deliver with fidelity. Inclusion of underserved groups is achievable but requires active strategies beyond standard NHS referral routes. Findings inform a provisional logic model and a future pragmatic trial.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do Time Series Foundation Model Benchmarks Hide Regime-Dependent Failures? Evidence from Traffic Speed Forecasting

arXiv:2606.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard benchmarks evaluate time series foundation models (TSFMs) using aggregate metrics, but these can mask severe failures in critical operating regimes. We introduce regime-stratified evaluation and apply it to three TSFMs on two standard traffic speed benchmarks. Traffic exhibits abrupt regime switching between free-flow and congested states, producing bimodal speed distributions during transitions. When we stratify by traffic regime, both accuracy and prediction-interval coverage degrade sharply during transitions: transition-regime MAE reaches 11 mph (versus 3 mph overall), and empirical coverage of 90% prediction intervals drops as low as 55%. These failures are invisible in aggregate metrics because free-flow observations dominate the sample. A simple historical conditional baseline (sampling from per-sensor training distributions) achieves better transition coverage than any TSFM, but has far worse overall accuracy. We propose bimodal mixture augmentation (BMA), a post-hoc method that combines TSFM forecasts with historical distributional knowledge, approaching the historical baseline's transition coverage while preserving the TSFM's accuracy. Our results suggest that TSFM benchmarks should incorporate regime-aware evaluation to surface failures that aggregate metrics hide.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

IB-HFN: Information Bottleneck-Driven SAR-Optical Fusion Network for High-Fidelity Cloud Removal

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-assisted optical cloud removal aims to recover surface information obscured by clouds in optical remote sensing images by exploiting complementary SAR observations. Existing multimodal fusion methods typically rely on direct spatial concatenation and pixel-wise supervision, which can propagate SAR speckle noise into optical reconstruction and lead to over-smoothed results. To address these limitations, we propose an Information Bottleneck-driven High-Fidelity Network (IB-HFN) for SAR-assisted optical cloud removal. IB-HFN employs a dual-stream backbone to preserve modality-specific representations before deep semantic fusion, thereby mitigating premature cross-modal contamination. At the fusion stage, we introduce a Spatial Information Bottleneck Fusion module that compresses SAR features through a channel-wise variational information bottleneck to suppress unstructured speckle noise. In parallel, a local-global gating mechanism predicts clear-sky regions and routes reliable optical details through a Dirac-initialized skip connection, decoupling noise suppression from texture preservation. We further develop a joint optimization strategy that integrates feature-level bottleneck regularization with image-level constraints on reconstruction accuracy, structural consistency, spectral fidelity, and contrastive sharpness. A dynamic weighting schedule balances these objectives to stabilize training and reduce hazy artifacts. Experiments on the SEN12MS-CR dataset under challenging spatio-temporal splits demonstrate that IB-HFN achieves superior structural preservation and spectral fidelity over existing methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.